Death - dice

And, in Ham Alley, Cripple Wa’s famous floating crap game was just getting under way. Several dozen cowled figures knelt or squatted around the little circle of packed earth where Wa’s three eightsided dice bounced and spun their misleading lesson in statistical probability.

“Three!”

“Tuphal’s Eyes, by Io!”

“He’s got you there, Hummok! This guy knows how to roll his bones!”

IT’S A KNACK.

Hummok M’guk, a small flat-faced man from one of the Hublandish tribes whose skill at dice was famed wherever two men gathered together to fleece a third, picked up the dice and glared at them. He silently cursed Wa, whose own skill at switching dice was equally notorious among the cognoscenti but had, apparently, failed him, wished a painful and untimely death on the shadowy player seated opposite and hurled the dice into the mud.

“Twenty-one the hard way!”

Wa scooped up the dice and handed them to the stranger. As he turned to Hummok one eye flickered ever so slightly. Hummok was impressed—he’d barely noticed the blur in Wa’s deceptively gnarled fingers, and he’d been watching for it.

It was disconcerting the way the things rattled in the stranger’s hand and then flew out of it in a slow arc that ended with twenty-four little spots pointing at the stars.

Some of the more streetwise in the crowd shuffled away from the stranger, because luck like that can be very unlucky in Cripple Wa’s floating crap game.

Wa’s hand closed over the dice with a noise like the click of a trigger.

“All the eights,” he breathed. “Such luck is uncanny, mister.”

***

Mort p121-122